Review: Brick

It's Oscar season, and here I am, still reviewing older movies. What fun is the Oscars when it's the same 6 films in every single category (looking at you, effing Benjamin Button)? I'll admit it was alright, but I've found one equally alright. I bring you the anti-Oscar.

I found Brick (2005) stumbling on a blog about the top 5 movies that you've never heard of but you should watch. Sigh. How cliche. IMDB plot summary: high school...underworld...crime ring...investigate...



I'M SOLD.

First few minutes in, and this is very obviously an indie film. It's refreshing to see one every so often, because watching non-cgi visual effects fills you with a sweet feeling inside, like watching a chill magic show. Do those exist? They do old-school things like filming a scene in reverse and playing it back to get the IMPOSSIBLE!!!! shot. Reminds me of the cheapness of Jacob's Ladder effects too.
Effects and cinematography +1

Head man is Joseph Gordon-Levitt, whose name or face you might, might recognize. I don't know what you watch. Here, he looks like he could be a cross between John Lennon and a young Heath Ledger. And what could be a better combination for a guy who fearlessly infiltrates a drug ring involving high school students. The support is rather well-played too. Considering that the dialogue is a shitstorm of slang (it took subtitles and some intermittent pauses to get through key plot points), the resulting performances hold up. And thank god it's not the same boring high school stereotypes. I lied. It is the same stereotypes. But not boring though, because it takes the characters from, say, American Pie, and applies a Max Payne story to it. The original video game, not some weird junk with valkyries 'n shit.

Yes, ultimately, it's a noir film and sort of a revenge film, and it grabs you by the collar as it runs down some dank alley. Enjoy.
Read More......

Double Feature! Burn After Reading / The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

I was interrupted in the middle of reviewing Burn After Reading to get a chance to watch The Curious Case of Benjamin Button for free. Turns out a friend of a friend happens to be on the Academy and had a copy "for your consideration." Ain't that phrase too familiar, you pirates.

Halfway through it, I realized Brad Pitt and Tilda Swinton were in both, so I felt like lumping the two reviews in one. And I can summarize my thoughts of both with a quote from Burn After Reading:

"With all due respect, but what the fuck are you talking about?"

1) Burn After Reading

Barely 3 minutes in and John Malkovich hits a home run. This follows in the same vein of cult classic The Big Lebowski (a personal favorite), but BAR lacks the distinctive moments that made Lebowski completely memorable. I mean, he peed on the Dude's rug.

Not to say it was a terrible movie. It was very entertaining, particularly because of every single actor's complete transition into their character. This makes for some very awesome subtle humor, and it was mostly at those points I started cracking up, rather than the obviously jokey parts. Come to think of it, I don't remember if there were many obviously jokey parts. And that's the way I like it.

Thoughts: pretend it's an episode of the Office, except everyone's backstabbing each other.

2) The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

First thoughts: holy crap, this movie felt long. The length looks to be its biggest bite in the ass, clocking in at 2hr40min. And it's not like the pace varies too much. It takes a painfully long time to set up the wrapper story (think: characters in the present reminiscing so that you can conveniently skip parts of the main character's story). Iseewhatyoudidthere, Mr. Fincher. It's supposed to make Benjamin Button seem all the more mystical. But goddamn if it doesn't take a long time getting there, because I don't really care about the hardly intelligible old lady or her daughter. I just wanna see a wrinkly old guy do childish things.

And I wasn't disappointed here. Makeup/costumes/set design/cinematography deserve all kinds of credit here for really selling the gradual un-aging of Benjamin Button and the look of each decade. Despite using several actors for the extreme ages, you gotta hand it to Makeup for making 40-odd-year-old Brad Pitt eventually look 20.

I don't wanna ruin/spoil too much, so here are my main thoughts: technically excellent, had a workable story and good characters (heyo, drunken Irish seacaptain), but the underwhelming ending feels like the past 3 hours was all for naught. So much for it being as "absorbing" as people praise it to be.

Recommend you watch Lola Rennt (German) + Big Fish + Forrest Gump if you can't sit through the first half hour.
Read More......

Jacob's Ladder and the Silent Hill series (with samples!)

Film brogging continues as I switch to a whole new genre after covering action and sci-fi. Today, it's horror/thriller. This will be about Jacob's Ladder and more importantly, its influence on the Silent Hill video game series. And while we're here, fuck the Silent Hill movie adaptation. What a waste.

So about the movie itself: Tim Robbins plays a Vietnam vet (Jacob) who suffers from flashbacks and starts to believe that demons are following him. Perhaps the plot sounds a little generic, but one strength is that the focus is on Jacob's slipping grip on reality, rather than the demons themselves. So the scares come from a sense of claustrophobia and normal environments increasingly becoming demented. Overall, it wasn't completely bad, but it felt a little sloppy. They tried slapping in a Vietnam conspiracy ("I KNEW it." Yeah. That was a real line of dialogue.) and the blatant deus ex machina is laughable and does not satisfyingly resolve the movie.

Not all was lost, though. This clip (with Silent Hill music added for a MUCH better effect) shows the best scene of Jacob's Ladder, and it's a glorious 3.5 minutes of pant-shitting terror. SH owes it to Jacob's Ladder for introducing the "shaky head" effect and hellish hospital ambiance, both of which are in here. Take the dive:



Which takes us to the Silent Hill games themselves. Some people swear by them, claiming that they're some of the best horror games ever made. To whom I say, probably not. The controls are pretty effing bad, the camera swings all over the place, and the stories can be incoherent mindfucks (though that's part of the charm). However, the games do have 2 things going for them: the atmosphere and the sound.

This is a different kind of horror; it's not surprise!-zombies-mothafucka, but more like do-you-really-wanna-keep-walking-that-way. Whenever an enemy gets close, your pocket radio emits more static until you're looking for the thing just so that it can be quiet again. The city areas are usually covered in fog, so wherever you go, you feel a little more trapped. If you choose to run, the music--if you can even call it music--builds up and you feel more and more vulnerable as you get the sense that something might be sneaking up on you. If you choose to take it slow and fight, you spend a longer time in a place you really don't want to be in.

Enough talk, here's clips from Silent Hill 2 and 3. Remember, it's all about the sound and getting plunged into the visuals.


Goddamn.
Read More......

The Day the Earth Stood Still

Some of you may have seen the trailer for the 2008 remake of the ancient-yet-classic The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). It came before Quantum of Solace for me. Isn't it exciting that awkward Keanu Reeves is gonna be back in action, this time as an alien come to give earth a very important message. I'm sure peeing my pants in anticipation.

Not really. Trailer Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_bNDv0-ZrU

I'd vaguely heard of the original The Day the Earth Stood Still, it being one of those titans of sci-fi, just like Blade Runner. But we all know how Blade Runner turned out. And if you don't know how Blade Runner turned out, I'm saying it sucked. Or at least, it was not very fun to watch. Regardless, this one felt like it had a different tone going for it, so I proceeded to delve a little further...

Turns out this was based off a 1940 short story by Harry Bates called "Farewell to the Master", in which an alien (Klaatu) and his robot (Gnut) come to earth, but the alien gets shot within seconds cause humans are so damn scared of the guy. The story then revolves around what happens with the robot, who apparently freezes in place when Klaatu dies.

Short Story Link: http://thenostalgialeague.com/olmag/bates.html

The film adaptation is just that, an adaptation. Same idea, different execution. I think this movie still has some flavor some 50 years later just cause of its philosophy, which is pretty interesting enough. The original raised issues of nuclear mutual assured destruction, while the upcoming one will be about global warming. In both cases, Klaatu represents the alien race that's wondering what the hell humans are up to.

Makes you wonder how big a bunch of assholes the whole human race can be.

About the movie itself: I have a hard time judging old movies. It feels like I have to use a totally different scale. So I'm just gonna say it was relatively entertaining and thought-provoking, aside from the dashingly good-looking alien acting a bit like he doesn't belong in society and acts the creeper and basically latching onto this mother and her son, who I'd like to have hit in the mouth for not shutting up at times. But hey, it was a different era of films.

Bottom line: check it out if you like sci-fi a little bit (the thinking kind, not the action kind), otherwise, you can live without seeing it. Same probably goes for lord Keanu Reeves' version come December 12. Except he'll probably shame the sci-fi fans, too. Oh well. At least there's The Matrix.
Read More......

My Turn (a review of Quantum of Solace, with some spoilers)

Over the past month, you've had a healthy dose of the 4 other broggers' areas of expertise. Whether that be kiyoshi's financial analysis, or chuck's fashion faux pas, or even victor's rare gems of insight into the human condition and friendship, or eleung's superb ability to document the slightest whimsicalities of the day, you've enjoyed it all. At the very least, you've stuck around to read it all.

Needless to say, it's time that efung step up to the plate and dispel the notion that my time is spent on pewter figurines and used underwear. So what, pray tell, do I bring to the table?

I watch a damn lot of movies.

Without further ado, here's my review of Quantum of Solace, which I watched Friday night with Jimmy, Christa, and Rachel. See how I snuck that shout-out in there too? I'm good at that too.


Anyways, I'll make it clear from the beginning that Quantum of Solace was, for the most part, an enjoyable movie. Being an action movie, it delivered by having action. There was no getting away from it, frankly. That said, I've got a lot of crap to pick with QoS for failing to live up to Casino Royale.

The trailer: too much revealed. All the best scenes of the movie were given away in the trailer. What the hell was the point of that scaffolding+rope scene if you show 1) Bond epically breaking in through the ceiling and 2) picking up his gun just in time to shoot the dude? And fantastic, you show a shot of Bond walking out of the desert like a badass, raising a silenced UMP45 (or something like that), and you don't include it in the movie. So maybe it was really just a promo shot. And if that's the case, then damn. Couldn't have hurt to include it, since by this time, they'd already made Bond *godlike*.

The Bond Theme: srsly? When I went home for the USC game, my brother played "Another Way to Die", and I didn't even realize it was the bond theme until he told me at the end of the song. What the hell, man. I don't have a big problem with either Alicia Keys or the White Stripes, but this song is not memorable at all. So if this were just a b-side to the next White Stripes album, I wouldn't think twice. I might even have liked it. But this garbledy nonsense should not pass for a bond theme. Just saying.

Technology nirvana. Being a techie, I can't help but pick at the supernatural powers that films bestow on technology. I've learned to suspend my disbelief in some cases, but it's still something that nags (see Cracked's 5 Things Hollywood Thinks Computers Can Do). QoS throws in its vote with an insane Surface operating system that does all the work for you. At least in Minority Report, Tom Cruise actually looked like he was expending some effort when he picked out the files he wanted to look at. Here, you get all the information you could possibly want! MI6 also apparently decided to shell out for a glass wall that triples as a world map and conference phone. And finally, technology's so good that your phone can have a camera that lets you take photos of people 100 feet away so perfectly in the dark without a flash that you can run facial recognition software on them and come up with positive results in a snap. Yeah. Why don't I just shut up and let you believe in the infinite capabilities of computers and intelligence agencies.

Plot Hell. Sadly, this happens too often with movies. Okay, I didn't understand why things were happening half the time, but I can deal with that, especially when you negate it with Stunts Heaven. But when you throw in a line of dialogue that exists for the sole purpose of justifying the title of the film, you are doing things wrong. For that matter, when you throw random shit in for the sole purpose of justifying the film (read: obligatory opening chase scene), you are doing things wrong. And it definitely does not help when a major plot question such as "What is this organization that has people everywhere, and we know nothing about it?" doesn't ever go answered.

Lack of suspense. This ties back to the first point, where I'd seen everything in the trailer. Just think back for a second. Remember the black-and-white opening scene of Casino Royale where pre-00 Bond confronts his target in the guy's own office? Remember that sense of omgwhat'llhappennext? Remember when he goes all-in against a full-house of Aces? Yeah, you do. That's the kind of thing that burns into your memory. That's the mark of something special.

Final word: I walked out of Quantum of Solace feeling like I'd already seen the movie before. Bland villain, unspecial action sequences--that rooftop chase felt like it came straight out of Bourne Ultimatum--bumbling plot with characters I don't really care about. The film was fine, but only as a B-action movie, and absolutely not as a gratifying follow-up to Casino Royale that everyone wanted.

I'll be getting off my high horse now. Read More......